Carol Bartz, fired as chief executive of Yahoo Inc. last September, wishes she did one thing differently during her troubled tenure. "I probably wouldn't have said the F-word,'' Ms. Bartz said at a Women in the Economy conference this month organized by The Wall Street Journal. Fellow Yahoo directors discouraged her frequent use of swear words, people familiar with the matter have said.

Opinions differ. Last year, at Forbes, Susan T. Spencer admonished Bartz's defenders, calling cursing on the job a lose-lose strategy. Sure enough, letting the four letter words slip can get you fired. One study showed that 38 percent of office managers who terminated employees for breaching etiquette did so because the poor guy or girl used foul language. On the other hand, University of East Anglia researchers "found in a study that swearing actually helped co-workers build relationships with one another and enabled them to express their feelings."

Here's a thought: swearing is actually meaningless. Bad words are bad because we have agreed that they are, and though that's a respectable social convention, most of us know how to discern the exception, and the degrees of exception, to the rule. Maintaining that informality -- and the burden of responsibility for continually negotiating the awkward space between pure compliance and communicative anarchy -- is essential not only to a free society but to a free economy.

During a Congressional hearing last April, U.S. senators grilled executives at investment bank Goldman Sachs over a curiously colorful comment made by one of its lieutenants regarding the unattractive nature of a sub-prime mortgage deal. In a June 2007 email, the Goldman banker called this particular deal a raunchy, six-letter expletive.

Soon after, the company quickly cleaned up its communications policy, telling its 34,000 traders, investment bankers and other employees that they would no longer be able to send e-mails containing profanity.

However divisive Goldman Sachs might be, Americans should be able to agree that the federal government has no business getting its pants in a twist over how coarsely private citizens engaged in business activity choose to speak to each other. Sure, vulgarity can be a helpful if crude way to gauge how dangerous or bad a person is, especially situationally. Legislators or regulators concerned about bad business practices aren't thinking illogically when they see a curse-laden email and make some assumptions about what kind of people they're investigating. But there's nothing logical about blanket profanity bans. In a free society, policing language isn't a legal function, it's a cultural one. Just look what happens to language when it becomes bureaucratic and regulatory -- it becomes something that nobody would voluntarily speak. Banning profanity is like banning alcohol: whack the mole in one place, and it pops up in another. Want to create a language problem in the workplace? Impose a swearing ban, complete with warnings, writeups, and terminations. See how that works for you.

The better approach is to let people speak for themselves -- with or without curse words -- and allow others to treat them as they wish. Any abuses that might arise as a consequence of unequal power relationships are going to be more than offset by the benefits of keeping everyone responsible for themselves and accountable to those they work with.